Here's a tale of how public money for good works can end up in private offshore hands that is troubling conscientious corners of the City.

It involves the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), an enterprise set up by a fund co-founded by the UK Department for International Development, which decided to invest $25m (£16m) into a start-up satellite services provider called O3B Networks.

If the EAIF really wanted to make “a real and lasting difference on the development of sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure”, as it states on its website, wouldn’t it have done better to invest in an African-owned satellite company?

Channel Islands-based O3B prefers not to break down its exact ownership structure, says a spokesman. But, given its largest shareholder is the Luxembourg-based satellite group, SES, accompanied by the similarly tax-conscious Google, it has a distinctly first-world flavour.

Diary hopes the revelation that the Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista has gone into extra, extra time with the creditors of his $5bn-in-hock oil company, OGX, doesn’t prove a red card for next year’s football World Cup.

The Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, where the final of the tournament is to be played, is managed by a consortium that includes Batista’s entertainment venture, IMX.

Of course, if the Rio government, which has been promised monthly payments of R$5.5m (£1.6m) by the Maracana's backers, should discover one corner of the finance squad is struggling to meet those debt deadlines, it could always make a tactical substitution...

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Some confusion over when Sir Tony Baldry, the Tory MP and deputy chair of Woburn Energy, added to his portfolio by becoming chairman of the London-listed paper company Kazakhstan Kagazy.

In the statement to the Stock Exchange on August 1, Sir Tony said he was “thrilled to be joining Kazakhstan Kagazy at such an exciting time”. How, then, to explain the disclosure in the latest Register of Members’ Interests that Kazakhstan Kagazy had been paying Sir Tony “director’s fees” of £10,000 per month since June?

Over to an aide, who says that – as the August statement didn’t mention – Sir Tony was, in fact, a non-exec of three months’ standing at the time of being handed the chairman’s role.